ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo L. Schwab) (12/28/88)
[ Your fly is open. ]
Sometime back, I vaguely recall a rather heated discussion on which
arrangement was better: big-endian or little-endian. What was the outcome
of this discussion? Did anyone "win"?
As I see it, there are advantages to both approaches. Since I find
the terms big-endian and little-endian as being terribly nondescriptive of
what they represent (can anyone supply a mnemonic?), I'll use unambiguous
terms.
Least-significant-byte first has the advantage of being able to
specify the low order byte or word of a longword in memory by specifying the
same address for all three. I.e. if you had the value 0xAABBCCDD stored at
location <foo>, then you'd specify <foo> to get at the low order byte
(0xDD), word (0xCCDD), and full longword. No funny pointer arithmetic is
needed.
Most-significant-byte first lets you read a hex dump more easily.
If you're reading a hex dump as individual bytes, you don't have to mentally
swap bytes around to read addresses and such; they will appear in an order
such that you can read them off directly.
Both representations are useful. Are there any other respective
advantages I've left out?
Flames to /dev/null, or my mailbox, please...
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
Leo L. Schwab -- The Guy in The Cape INET: well!ewhac@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
\_ -_ Recumbent Bikes: UUCP: pacbell > !{well,unicom}!ewhac
O----^o The Only Way To Fly. hplabs / (pronounced "AE-wack")
"Work FOR? I don't work FOR anybody! I'm just having fun." -- The Doctormark@cbnews.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) (12/29/88)
I'd like to thank all the people who so quickly responded to my query. The answer turns out to be that Danny Cohen originated the terms in IEN 137 and in the October 1981 issue of IEEE Computer, in a paper called "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace". Mark Horton